Activist Fundamentalist Antics

Lets say that you are right and everyone else is wrong, but everyone outside your little group of like-minded righteous people are simply to dumb to understand that you are superior. Surely you would be tempted to try to reach their hearts by methods that might seem a little silly and counterproductive?

Extra bonus points if two or more groups are doing this at the same time against each other. This might lead to spineless authorities giving in to both sides, resulting in particularly surreal and hilarious cases of Political Correctness Gone Mad.

Note that a character doesn't have to be an organized activist to be this trope, taking an activist attitude is enough.

Please note that this trope relies on how attitudes and behaviors are portrayed within the narrative of a work, and is thus incapable of having Real Life examples: While everyone agree that there's a lot of silly Activist Fundamentalist Antics in Real Life, there will never be a consensus on which groups are this trope and which ones are not.

Compare Straw Loser. Contrast Against My Religion, where the character personally refuse to do things that he consider to be against his religion, rather then trying to bully everyone else into behaving the same way. Also contrast The Soulsaver and Soulsaving Crusader, which can contain behavior that would be this trope if it wasn't justified within the narrative.

Examples

In The Verse of Chick Tracts, a real christian would never resort to this kind of behavior. (They sometimes do stuff that would be this trope if it wasn't for the convenient power of Easy Evangelism - such as using people's personal tragedies as a good time to tell them that they are going to hell unless they join the one true religion. But never mind that.) However, preachers of other faiths easily fall into this trope, thus proving the christians to be superior.

One Boston Legal episode had two religious groups suing each other for blasphemy-related charges.

On True Blood we have the Fellowship of the Sun, a cult runnoing on a quite scary flavor of silliness.

Virgilia in the North And South miniseries is a particularly scary example. At first she was merely ruining family dinners and such, but she eventually goes off the deep end and even call down a lynch mob on her own home. The saddest part is that her family actually agreed all along with the core of her political agenda, what they can't stand is her extreme Black and White Morality.

The Onion reports on Christ Converts To Islam: Millions more, however, have decried the recalcitrant Christ's apostasy, breaking ties with Him and calling His conversion "a heathen act" of "utmost blasphemy before Himself."

One South Park episode ended with a ban on secular christmas as well as religious christmas, all thanks to Kyle's mother. The only song left for the kids to sing for christmas was "Kyle's mom is a stupid bitch" (in d minor, no less).

Of course secular examples are welcome. However, what the PETA example exemplifies is why this trope should not allow Real Life examples. The KKK outfits was surely Godwins Law, but there is a huge YMMV factor to whether or not the demonstration itself was this trope or not. Westbro Babtist Church is far less controversial: Pretty much everyone, including self-identified christian fundamentalists, agree about those guys, but there's a lot of disagreement over PETA.

Allowing secular Real Life examples while forbidding religious ones, WTF? Unless that suggestion was some kind of humor/sarcasm, it was a horrible idea on so many levels.

Anyway: Penn and Teller portrayed PETA as this trope, I'll add that media examples later today or tomorrow. Also, I think The Onion had at least one PETA example along these lines.

And also anyways: Yes, I'll wipe the current Westbro Babtist Church Web Original media example. Mostly because it doesn't fit the way the trope definition is going - It's moving towards being a narrative trope on how activism et cetera is portrayed: Note that the Chick Tracts example already counts the evangelicals as an aversion because their behavior is justified in the setting and doesn't come across as this trope even though it surely would in real life.

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